Sarah Bronwen Horton

While I have a great deal to say about this book, I'll write something brief. As advocacy -- as a nuanced and detailed analysis of the social, economic, and physiological factors at work in causing deaths among migrant farmworkers in California -- this work succeeds. But that is just what it is: sociological journalism with a heavy dose of polemic, meant to draw attention to the legal framework that maintains a status quo of exploitable inequality. Between the Introduction and Conclusions, Chapter Five stands out most for developing the concept of 'syndemic' to describe the interactions of separate medical issues and the social milieu that incubates them to hatch a complete mortality template. Much of the rest of the book is repetition of anecdotes, statistics, and discussion of various government programs involved; these are central to the thesis but blitheringly poorly written.

While labeled again and again as 'anthropology' and self-described by the author as 'participant observation,' this is neither. It is social journalism compiled via interviews. Look, I KNOW senior Editor Rob Borofsky and I have been involved with the Public Anthropology Project; if anything, I am biased in favor of the dynamic. But as to the matter at hand, Horton does not live with the migrant workers, work in the fields beside them, employ with a contractor, nor fully immerse any of this in the culture of the Latinx workers (whether Mexican or Salvadoran). Further, her theoretical framework is a pastiche of postmodernist and sociological, allowing Bourdieu to carry the bulk of the load. These factors, coupled with the choppy writing and "oral report at a staff meeting" presentation make this fit for a legislative committee far more than an undergraduate classroom or a casual reader.… (plus d'informations)